![]() ![]() “Steinbeck and Collins saw, documented, and toiled to alleviate mind-numbing, spirit-killing poverty, squalor, epidemic disease, malnutrition, and outright starvation among a vast valley assemblage of least 100,000 (historical estimates vary)-often lacking even subsistence in the most abundant ‘food-basket’ of the nation,” Nealand writes. Nealand mined the archived holdings to find the reports of Tom Collins, a government official who was in charge of some of the migrant labor camps of refugees from places like Oklahoma and Texas. ![]() ![]() The steep economic downturn and the tragic loss of so many jobs reminds many of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the Dust Bowl conditions, ruined crops, and repossessed homes, sent many destitute families to California-a chapter in American history immortalized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.īut Steinbeck’s Tom Joad and the other characters in this well-known novel were based on real people, as Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, points out in its Winter 2008 issue, “Archival Vintages for The Grapes of Wrath,” written by Dan Nealand, director of the National Archives Regional Archives in San Bruno, CA. ![]()
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